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Monday, February 28, 2011

Well, it happened. Construction has begun on the vacant lot across the road. 120 Amity Street has been sold and is currently nothing. By sometime next year it will be a townhouse.

The Lamm Insitute, next door at 110 Amity Street, used to bother me. Children were wheeled in and out in wheelchairs with disabilities ranging from severe to very severe. The place was hollow and dirty and the huge grounds deserted, empty, neglected. All very Victorian and hard to swallow in 2010. I had grand plans of designing a real garden for the wheeled children. Then it was shuttered and put on the market.

A local homeless man used to sleep in the sheltered doorway until plywood doors barred it and gave him the boot late last fall, just when it turned cold.

Locally, Curbed tells us, it is known as The Amity Street Horror, though that was news to me. It was fairly horrific, though the architecture itself never bothered me. I like it. It was more the utter neglect characteristic of many of the LICH-owned buildings that surround us. And the Dickension children...

The real horror now, is noise. Heavy equipment is roaring in the cold drizzle, and it will be a long year. With double glazing buffering some of it in cold weather, spring will be interesting, with the usually-wide-open door to the tiny terrace admitting the roaring and the dust. I imagine myself sitting here and trying to write. Help.

Thanks for the fracking link. The water is contaminated with radiation, so we won't test it, then we can say no problem. Cancer? Nothing to do with radioactive drinking water. And the ocean is not big enough to dilute it. Imagine, all that in the Karoo ... help ...

What became of the children you wanted to make a garden for? Are they being better cared for somewhere else?

In House Blogs

Good Food Blogs

Reasons to Dogear a Page

We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

How will we know it's us without our past?

...How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know - and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?